Free Hand is Gentle Giant at their most dazzling and, improbably, their most successful — a record of fiendish counterpoint and irresistible swing that became their highest-charting album in America. Released in 1975, it is the album that finally made their genius sound like fun, and it remains the one most fans reach for first.

The short version

Free Hand (1975) is the seventh studio album by Gentle Giant, and their first for Chrysalis Records. Self-produced by the quintet of Derek Shulman, Ray Shulman, Kerry Minnear, Gary Green and drummer John Weathers, it keeps the band’s labyrinthine complexity while sounding cleaner, warmer and more inviting than anything before it. Home to the vocal fugue ‘On Reflection’ and the driving title track, it reached number 48 in the US — their best chart placing ever.

Free at last

The album’s title was not accidental. Gentle Giant had spent eighteen unhappy months on the WWA label, and extricating themselves cost them dearly. Signing with Chrysalis — home to Jethro Tull, whom they had supported and liked — gave them, at last, a free hand. The band had also changed shape: Phil Shulman, the eldest brother, had left in 1973 to spend more time with his family, and John Weathers now sat behind the drums. Reduced to five and finally in charge of their own affairs, they wrote for seven weeks, recorded for a month at Advision, and produced the record themselves.

The sound

Everything that made Gentle Giant extraordinary is here, but the light comes through. The production is clear and generous, the arrangements a little less dissonant than on The Power and the Glory, and the grooves genuinely joyful. Kerry Minnear’s keyboards function as a one-man orchestra, ranging from harpsichord to Minimoog; Ray Shulman’s bass and violin dart through the metres; Gary Green plays with fire and wit; John Weathers holds the whole shifting edifice together. And the voices — the interlocking, madrigal-like vocal writing — reach a peak here that rock music has rarely approached before or since.

The songs

‘Just the Same’ opens on interlocking finger snaps and a bounding rhythm, before ‘On Reflection’ unfolds as a four-part vocal fugue, part unaccompanied, that stands as the band’s most celebrated feat of counterpoint. The title track is the album’s hardest-driving piece, all cocky riff and swagger. ‘Time to Kill’ hides a delightful secret: its intro uses sounds from the arcade game Pong, taped on a cassette recorder in a pub near the studio, and thought to be the first videogame sound ever used on a rock record. ‘His Last Voyage’ is quietly beautiful, ‘Talybont’ a Tudor-flavoured miniature, and ‘Mobile’ a folk-tinged closer with wah-wah violin.

Reception and legacy

Free Hand was Gentle Giant’s commercial peak, reaching the Top 50 of the American chart at a moment when several of their progressive contemporaries were faltering. Critics welcomed a record that proved complexity need not mean coldness, and the band, now headliners, could finally choose their own tours. Ray Shulman named ‘His Last Voyage’ his favourite of everything they recorded. Today Free Hand is routinely voted their finest album, and it is the one most often pressed into the hands of newcomers — the perfect balance of virtuosity, invention and sheer delight.

The verdict

Free Hand is the essential Gentle Giant album, and the best place in the world to begin with them. Everything that can make the band daunting — the shifting metres, the medieval counterpoint, the refusal to repeat themselves — is here in abundance, and yet it swings, sparkles and delights from the first snap of fingers. Come for the astonishing ‘On Reflection,’ stay for the strut of the title track and the beauty of ‘His Last Voyage,’ and hear five musicians who could genuinely do anything, doing it with a smile.

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